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UBC: Ivan's War
Jan. 9th, 2010 09:39 pmMerridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador-Henry Holt and Co., 2007.
This book makes a good pairing with Hitler's Army, which is about German soldiers on the Eastern Front, and in another direction, a good pairing with The Gulag Archipelago, since it is from that same front that Solzhenitsyn began his journey into the strange and desolate archipelago he writes of, and Merridale provides context for the world which he left.
But this is also an excellent book read solely on its own. Merridale did her research among the primary sources that are only now becoming available to scholars and in interviews with veterans. She is thoughtful and compassionate, both about what the men and women of the Red Army did (and were done to) during the war and about how they remember it now. It is, almost incidentally, a scathing critique of Stalinism and of Stalin himself, and reinforces my feeling that the history of Russia in the twentieth century is a history of one betrayal after another. It is full of vivid details and evidence from as wide a variety of witnesses as Merridale could manage: officers, infantrymen, tankmen, women soldiers. And she talks very explicitly about the gaps which cannot be recovered. For example, although the soldiers' songs were preserved by ethnographers, none of their curses survive, and almost none of their jokes, because the censors forbade it.
I will be looking for her first book, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.
This book makes a good pairing with Hitler's Army, which is about German soldiers on the Eastern Front, and in another direction, a good pairing with The Gulag Archipelago, since it is from that same front that Solzhenitsyn began his journey into the strange and desolate archipelago he writes of, and Merridale provides context for the world which he left.
But this is also an excellent book read solely on its own. Merridale did her research among the primary sources that are only now becoming available to scholars and in interviews with veterans. She is thoughtful and compassionate, both about what the men and women of the Red Army did (and were done to) during the war and about how they remember it now. It is, almost incidentally, a scathing critique of Stalinism and of Stalin himself, and reinforces my feeling that the history of Russia in the twentieth century is a history of one betrayal after another. It is full of vivid details and evidence from as wide a variety of witnesses as Merridale could manage: officers, infantrymen, tankmen, women soldiers. And she talks very explicitly about the gaps which cannot be recovered. For example, although the soldiers' songs were preserved by ethnographers, none of their curses survive, and almost none of their jokes, because the censors forbade it.
I will be looking for her first book, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.
